It's still up in the air when this phenomenon began to happen (1981 is as good a
guess as any), but Apple II pirates, not content to merely get commercial software
copied and the protection removed, started giving themselves group names ("Midwest
Pirates' Guild", "Black Bag", "High Society") and began to release these pirated
programs as products in themselves.

Initially, the goal was to take a program and quickly knock it down to an easily
downloadable file. When this was done, the accompanying documentation might tell you
who took the time to unprotect/crack the original, or a name of the cracker might
be in the beginning of the program. But then it started to spiral upwards.

Within a short time, these groups started using the "splash screens" of these programs
to announce their favorite bulletin boards, to take credit for unprotecting the software,
or in some cases to thumb their nose at either the software publisher or other pirates.
If a group was feeling particularly energetic or ambitious, they might actually create
a self-sufficient animated or fast-loading splash screen just for the pirates involved.
As time went on, these screens became more and more elaborate, eventually taking on
an almost crowded feel as they would shoehorn in the names of the group, the cracker
who cracked the game, the friends who the pirates knew (also known as "greets") and
an advertisement for the board or boards the pirates hung out on.

This directory is a collection of those splash screens, taken from an emulator and cropped
to exactly duplicate the original screens as they appeared on Apple IIs, both with color
and monochrome versions if possible. They give a fascinating insight into what may very
well be the roots of the "artscenes" of later years, including the demo and music scenes
that came to dominate the late 1980s and 1990s.

There is also a thumbnail gallery of these images available.
However, this is currently a very large set of images and the gallery takes a very
long time to load.